1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to telecommunications services. More particularly, the present invention relates to capabilities that enhance substantially the value and usefulness of various messaging paradigms including, inter alia, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Message Service (MMS).
2. Background of the Invention
As the ‘wireless revolution’ continues to march forward the importance to a Mobile Subscriber (MS), for example a user of a Wireless Device (WD) such as a mobile telephone, a BlackBerry, etc. that is serviced by a Wireless Carrier (WC), of their WD grows substantially.
One consequence of such a growing importance is the resulting ubiquitous nature of WDs—i.e., MSs carry them at almost all times and use them for an ever-increasing range of activities.
Coincident with the expanding presence of WDs has been the explosive growth of:
1) Content—both structured and unstructured on or within, possibly inter alia, all of the different information, entertainment, etc. sites that are available on the World Wide Web (WWW); WWW Logs (blogs); social networking facilities; etc.
2) Messaging—a steady annual increase, year over year, in the number of (SMS, MMS, etc.) messages that have been exchanged by and between WDs. That steady increase shows no sign of abating. For example, as reported by the industry group CTIA (see www.ctia.org) in the U.S. there were over 158 billion SMS messages sent during 2006 (representing a 95% increase over 2005) and there were over 2.7 billion MMS messages sent during 2006 (representing a 100% increase over 2005).
Under various circumstances it may be difficult, or even impossible, to display some types of content on a WD using the WD's native (e.g., E-Mail, SMS, Instant Messaging [IM], etc.) facilities. Examples of such content might include, possibly inter alia, languages that support or require double-byte characters (such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, etc.), mathematical equations, scientific equations, chemical formulas, etc. Several illustrative examples of such content are presented under FIG. 6 and reference numeral 600.
The specific examples that were described above are illustrative only and it will be readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the relevant art that numerous other examples are easily possible and indeed are fully within the scope of the present invention.
For such types of content it would be desirable to leverage the features, capabilities, etc. that are offered by MMS to be able to deliver such content to WDs by, possibly inter alia, processing the content (including, possibly among other steps, formatting the content, rendering the content as one or more images, etc.) and subsequently delivering the processed content to a WD via MMS.
The present invention facilitates such enhanced content delivery capabilities and addresses various of the (not insubstantial) infrastructure, etc. challenges that are associated with same.